Maryanne Dell: Let's rethink animal disabilities

This is Snickers the day I took him from the Orange County Animal Care Center in Orange. COURTESY OF BARBARA GERSCHNER

This one's going to be hard.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the sweetest, nicest, friendliest dog out of the Orange County shelter.

Snickers is about 5, so he's still got lots of life left. He loves nothing so much as to curl up in someone's lap and, if you get a part of your body close enough to him, give kisses. Thing about his kisses is they aren't like a lot of dog kisses: slobbery, wet to the point of annoyance, nonstop. They are sweet, gentle little things, almost tentative. And after a few, he's content to just curl up again.

He's adorable. Labeled as a Pekingese mix at the shelter, he's really more Tibetan spaniel than Peke. He has a muzzle, which Pekes lack, and he doesn't have the rolls of skin in front of his eyes that are part of the Peke's look.

Whatever he is doesn't matter; he just is, and he is, like I said, adorable.

But he has one issue that most potential adopters would consider a big one: He's blind.

So what? is my response. Blind dogs, unlike blind people, adapt. Oh, do they adapt. I've had several, and not a one has been in the least handicapped by his "disability." They have all found their way around, using their noses, which are so much more powerful than ours, and their ears, and some – I'm convinced – mysterious sense that we humans know nothing about.

Snickers is amazing. If you couldn't see that he is missing one eye and didn't look at the other one long enough to realize it is permanently fully dilated, you would never guess this little dog cannot see a thing.

Just this morning, before I sat down to write, I watched him discover that he was on a porch with stairs, and that if he wanted to get into the yard, he would have to navigate those stairs.

I know what you're thinking. He fell down the stairs, or at least tripped, or I had to pick him up and put him on the ground so he could explore.

You're wrong.

He started to step off the porch, realized there was air under his foot, and reached that foot down until he touched the stair below. He then quickly – as quickly as any sighted dog I know – ran down the stairs and out into the yard.

Let's see the average blind person do that.

Not that I would expect a blind person to do that, or that I'm saying there's anything wrong with the fact that an unseeing person would be much more tentative navigating those stairs than Snickers was.

Here's the difference: We humans are so dependent on our sight that we have mostly pushed our other senses out of the way. Oh, we taste, hear, smell and feel, but we do those things, almost always, with a nod to our superior eyesight, with an eye (sorry) to how these senses relate to what we're seeing.

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